NPR Morning Edition has a section on how ageing brains are slower but more shrewd.

There’s some excellent straight thinking coverage of the recent discovery of bones of an apparently new species of hominid over at Laelaps with Carl Zimmer using the opportunity to straighten out the ‘missing link’ fallacy.

The New York Times reports on how Google now return a crisis hotline when you do searches on how to commit suicide but only in English it seems. Half a billion Spanish speakers – una versi√≥n castellana por favor.

The Guardian has a video interview with David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of short stories about fantastic after-life possibilities. “We won’t die ‚Äì our consciousness will live forever on the internet”.

A new study on impulsivity, dopamine and addiction is covered by the splendid Addiction Inbox.

BBC News has an excellent piece by consistently excellent Mark Easton on the UK government’s failure to assess how effective their billions on drugs treatment services work.

Synthetic Neurobiology: Optically Engineering the Brain to Augment Its Function. A talk by MIT neural engineer Ed Boyden from The Singularity Summit 2009.

The Splintered Mind muses on people who come across as smart and how this relates to genuinely being smart. By the way, if you don’t read the blog, it is a public fountain of emerging philosophical thinking.

The New York Times discusses the ‘The Myth of Mean Girls‘ contrasting public concerns about the behaviour of girls and the fact that every major index of crime shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years.

The mighty Language Log has an evolutionary psychology bingo card. Eyes down for a full house.

The Onion has a brilliant video report: DEA Official Announces Successful Drug Bust on Son.

The ever-awesome BPS Research Digest discusses a still not completely convincing study that reports to have found the direct evidence for mirror neurons in the human brain using depth electrodes, including in the, er, hippocampus.